Song of Eternity
by Death To The Author
Summary: A forgotten civilization. A lost technology. An unknown heritage. A love that traverses time. An epic science-fantasy tale. Featuring Hatsune Miku and Megurine Luka in the lead roles, and tons of Vocaloid cameos.
1. Prologue

**PROLOGUE**

The city was in flames. All around them, buildings crumbled into dust as their supports charred and fractured, and the great banners which once adorned the walls and towers of the grand metropolis were quickly reduced to nothing but smoke and ash.

The pink-haired woman saw none of this, her attention focused entirely on the body of the young woman in her lap. She brushed the teal hair from the other's face and felt a hollow space in her heart that nothing would ever occupy again. It had taken her long - too long - to realize her own feelings, unfamiliar as she was with them.

And now… her beloved was gone. She longed to weep, to cry aloud, to scream her pain and anger to the heavens. She did none of this, for she could not. Not now, while those who had brought death to her beloved still lived; perhaps not ever, not with a heart as empty as hers. She leaned down and placed a gentle kiss on one pale, cold cheek. When once more she did not feel the girl in her lap stir, she hugged her close, desperate to feel her warmth one last time.

Pink and teal hair intertwined and tangled together as the sound of metal-shod heels began to echo in the streets. The enemy would be here soon.

Silently, she rose, lifting the light burden of her beloved in her arms. She faced the oncoming army with hatred in her pale blue eyes, and sorrow in her heart.

Her lips parted, and she breathed the song that brought the world to its end.


	2. Chapter 1: Thaw

**CHAPTER ONE: THAW**

"_-excavation has begun on a new archaeological find in Koto Ward. The site is located under Shinonome High School, and was initially discovered by members of the school's Culture Club. Officials have cordoned off the area and a team of professionals have arrived to begin the investigation. Information on the find is limited at this time, but we at Fuji TV hope to bring you more details when they arise. This is Anri Rune, signing off; now, back to the studio-_"

"It's not fair, Miku-senpai! We found it, why can't we take a look at it?"

Hatsune Miku, eighteen-year-old president of the Culture Club at Shinonome High, sighed and rubbed her temples with her fingers, looking up at Kagamine Rin with an exasperated expression. She barely even noticed as other students in the library made shushing sounds towards her junior, caught up in trying to come up with a compelling argument.

Rin wasn't quite so oblivious; she shot a glare at the people around her in response to their requests for silence, even as her twin brother Len, at her side as usual, cast an apologetic smile at the other students. "I know we're only the Culture Club, not archaeologists, but we know how to behave! And you more than anyone else should be angry!"

Miku winced, unable to argue against Rin's point; while Gumi was the one who had literally stumbled over the strange boulder in the back of the schoolyard while horsing around, it had been Miku who'd noticed the unusual engravings on the stone, and insisted on borrowing some shovels and brushes to get a closer look at the buried rock. She'd expected to find a prank at worst, or a forgotten grave marker at best; what she hadn't expected was for the rock to turn into a wall, a long-buried wall from some culture so old that she didn't recall anything about it from her history classes… and neither did Yowane-sensei, her History teacher, who she'd dragged out in the middle of the night to take a closer look at it. In the end, Yowane-sensei put in a call to the school board to get some advice… and all hell broke loose as the government descended en masse, sending a team of archaeologists and historians to investigate, and even security guards to set up barricades.

It was a complete mess. Sakine-sensei was in a horrible temper, having had to alter her lesson plans considerably now that half of the athletic field was dug up and under heavy guard; many of the athletically-oriented clubs at school were in the same boat. The presence of so many non-school personnel was a distraction and disruption… even more so since the archaeologists had determined that the ruins (what they were calling the find now) ran all the way under the school proper. They'd already knocked a hole in the wall of the boiler room to do some exploratory digging, which means workers were walking through the hallways of the school at all hours.

"Rin," Len began quietly, keeping his voice low, "don't bully Miku-senpai. There's not much she can do either, you know."

"But…!" Rin looked helplessly at Len for a moment before turning her eyes back to Miku. "There really isn't anything we can do?"

Miku sighed again, shaking her head. "I'm sorry, Rin-chan, but there really isn't. Gumi and I already spoke with the teachers and the principal; now that the government has taken over the excavation, everyone has to play by their rules. They aren't letting anyone in who isn't in their group, not even teachers. Yowane-sensei was really disappointed."

Rin's face fell, and she all but collapsed into a chair at the table Miku occupied. "If even she couldn't get in…"

"Then I doubt they'd let us in, Rin-chan. I'm sorry." Miku grimaced, but she leaned across the table to pat the blonde girl's shoulder consolingly. "Maybe if you ask nicely, Akita-san will let you see the pictures that they took for the the Journalism Club interview."

The blonde girl's expression twisted with unhappiness, even as Len sighed in frustration. "WHAT pictures?" he said, a cynical tone entering his voice as he took a seat at the table.

Miku glanced back and forth between the two twins, confusion writing itself into her features. "I must have missed something. Hadn't the Fuji TV team agreed to let the Journalism Club send a few cameras and reporters in with their crew?"

"They did. It was the government goons who blocked it. They wouldn't even let the Fuji crew on-site, and they outright banned students from the dig site and the boiler room. Neru-senpai was really upset, especially when she came back from complaining to the faculty; she says they only said that the rule was being enforced with suspensions and worse if necessary. They don't want ANYONE in there."

Miku looked taken aback as she absorbed this information - especially the fact that Neru had been turned away with nothing. She didn't much like the blonde-haired Journalism Club president, but the same abrasive, prying, and downright nosy attitude that made her dislike the girl was practically a necessity for a journalist to have, and she expected that 'and worse' had been necessary to keep Neru from persisting. "That's… pretty suspicious. It's just an archaeological dig, isn't it? Why all the secrecy?"

Len shrugged helplessly at that. "You guess is as good as mine, Miku-senpai. Neru-senpai didn't have any answers either." He looked up as the bell rang, echoing through the library. "Aw man. We got to get to class, Rin…"

"Alright, alright. Miku-senpai? I'm sorry for being so pushy…"

Miku blinked, and smiled at the blonde girl's unhappy face. "It's alright, Rin-chan, I know how you feel. Believe me, I wish we could get the opportunity as well. We'll meet at club tomorrow, okay?"

Rin smiled wearily, rubbing her face. "Yeah… thanks, Miku-senpai." She ran off to catch up with Len, leaving the older teal-haired girl sitting there, lost in thought.

* * *

The stairwell down to the sub-basement, where the boiler and mechanical room were kept, was swarming with students. A barricade complete with two security guards was present, but that didn't stop the students from trying their best to lean over the railings, barricade, and even the guards themselves to get a glimpse of what was going on down the stairs. They didn't acknowledge the guards as real authority figures, and so the guards maintained a very nervous presence amidst a sea of overly curious blue and tan blazers.

"WHAT IN HELL IS GOING ON HERE?! THIS ISN'T A SPECTATOR SPORT!"

The crowd almost immediately stilled as a teacher in a short red blazer and matching skirt pushed her way through the mass of students, an angry brown bob of hair the only thing most people could see. She reached the barricade and turned on her heel, brandishing a text book like a weapon of punishment; more than a few students knew how good Sakine Meiko's aim was, and backed away at the implied threat.

"Are you lot not paying attention to the rumour mill or something? Keep this up and you'll ALL get suspended for disrupting this project! Now GET! And don't come back unless you've got a good reason to bother these people!"

There was a lot of grumbling and grousing, but no one really wanted to get the Physical Education teacher any more wound up than she already was; the crowd began to thin almost immediately, exposing one particular figure who crouched below the level of the students' heads. Seeing her cover vanishing before her eyes, she darted towards the barricade, silver hair streaming behind her. Meiko grabbed that ponytail, resulting in a harsh squawk as its owner crashed to the floor. "Going somewhere, Haku-chan?"

"Owww… Meiko-san, that hurt…" Yowane Haku sat up heavily, rubbing her backside. She looked up at the other teacher with a wounded expression, her red eyes glittering with unshed tears. "I… I just wanted to get my sake. I kept it down in the mechanical room, where it would be nice and cool…"

"Nice try, Haku-chan." Meiko's brown eyes narrowed as she tugged lightly on Haku's long ponytail, encouraging her to stand up. "You don't really want the superintendent to have to suspend you, do you?"

"No," Haku said mournfully, her shoulders slumping in defeat. The taller woman's grey turtleneck and black pants looked slightly dusty from her collision with the ground, and Meiko sighed as she dusted her colleague's clothing off.

"Come on, Haku-chan," she said encouragingly, giving the older woman a crafty smile. "I'll buy you a drink, okay? And we can drown both our regrets in alcohol and tears." Meiko led Haku away from the barricade, leaving the two guards to shrug at each other uncertainly.

* * *

Gumi rubbed the back of her head and flicked a stray strand of green hair out of her face as she looked up at the bookshelves, before glancing out the nearby window to see that the sun was close to setting. "Are you sure you don't want any help, Miku?" she asked with concern. "I mean, it's pretty late… if you insist on looking for this book tonight, it's going to be dark when you leave. I'm willing to help."

Miku shook her head in response, looking up at her best friend with reassurance in her teal eyes. "I really appreciate the offer, but I'm not even sure I can explain what I'm looking for."

Gumi leaned against one of the bookshelves, which creaked ominously at the motion. Her tan blazer and tie lay over her shoulder, since she'd removed them for her club activities, leaving her just in her white shirt and green skirt. "Try me; maybe it'll spark a memory or something."

The teal-haired girl frowned slightly, playing with the end of one of her incredibly long pigtails. "Do you remember those symbols we found on the buried wall?"

Gumi strained to remember. "Well, there were a lot of them, but the biggest one was sort of a weird fork shape, right; all angular and pointy. Sorry, I'm not as big a fan of history as you are… but you didn't recognize it, and neither did Yowane-sensei."

Miku nodded in agreement, a thoughtful expression clouding her face. "When Len told me about how secretive the government is being about this dig, I started thinking about it some more… and I realized that I _did_ recognize the symbol. I just can't recall from where. I know it wasn't a history book, though."

"Not a history book?" Gumi's eyebrows knitted together in confusion. "Where else would you find symbols like that?"

Miku focused on the shelf in front of her for a moment, selecting one of the books and pulling it down off the shelf. "Lots of places… but the obvious one would be mythology."

The green-haired girl blinked, looked at the book that Miku had pulled out - a treatise on myths and legends in Japan and East Asia - and pursed her lips. "Are you sure you aren't just misremembering this? I mean, wouldn't Yowane-sensei have remembered something like that?"

Miku shook her hair at that, her hair bouncing on her jacketed shoulders. "History is about fact, not fiction; culture is informed by history, but also by myths and legends. It's just been bothering me that neither of us could figure out where that stuff came from. I _know_ I've seen it somewhere before, and I won't be able to rest until I do."

Gumi sighed after a moment, feeling defeated. "Well, if you're going to insist, then all I can do is wish you luck… and maybe bring you dinner?"

Miku laughed lightly at that, and released one of her arms from the book to wrap around Gumi's shoulders, giving her best friend a tight squeeze. "Thanks, but you know we can't bring food in here. Could you let my mom know that I'm going to be late, though? I kinda let my phone battery run dry again, so I can't call her."

Gumi shook her head in wonder and gave Miku an annoyed look. "Why do you even bother to carry that thing if you can't keep it charged? But sure, Miku, I'll take care of it."

"Thanks, Gumi." Miku gave the taller girl another squeeze, prompting a soft 'oof' from her. "Stay safe heading home, okay?"

"You too, Miku. Seriously, be careful, okay?" Gumi felt a nervous pang in her chest, not entirely comfortable with the idea of leaving her friend alone. She just couldn't put her finger on why, though; the school was plenty safe, wasn't it?

"Mmm-hmm," the teal-haired girl hummed distractedly in response, eyes fixed on the pages of the book in her hands. Gumi well knew that sound; it meant that Miku's attention was firmly on the text and not her surroundings. With a worried sigh, she made her way out of the library.

The short trip out of the school was moderately terrifying; the relative silence of the school was continually disturbed by the cries of phantoms and quiet tapping noises, like fingernails on glass. Gumi knew it was just noise from the dig underway beyond the boiler room, but the way the voices and other sounds echoed through the school made her shiver. Giving one last mumbled prayer for Miku's safety, she ran out of the school and made her way in the direction of her best friend's house.

* * *

The sound of pickaxes on stone and saws on wood had gone uninterrupted for a long time; one support beam after another were quickly cut and braced in the gap left by the team of diggers as they cut through the earth with zeal. Suddenly, there was a deeper sound, like cracking wood, and a series of alarmed shouts. One man pushed forward, holding a lantern aloft as he hushed the diggers, frowning into the gloom. After a moment, a grin split his face, prompting him to turn and look back over his shoulder.

[Clara!] he cried out in Spanish, excitement plain in his voice as he clutched at the hat on his head. [Come quickly! I think we've found something.]

At his urging, a woman with dark brown hair and sunglasses perched on her head pushed through the crowd, looking past the curly-haired man's shoulder into the faintly-illuminated cavern that had just been uncovered. A matching grin to his own creased her face as she hugged his shoulders. [We have, Bruno… this must be the chamber Yuzuki was speaking of!] she said, giving him a quick kiss on the cheek above the scruff of hair on his cheek.

[Is he here now? Is he awake?] Bruno asked her quickly, to which Clara only nodded in response. [See if he will come. As for you lot – you and you, widen this gap, quickly. You and you, fetch the spotlights and run the cables. Let's get some light in there!]

Things moved quickly after that; within minutes, the hidden chamber was accessible and illuminated with a half-dozen heavy spot lamps, fed by electrical cords running through the gap. Bruno had just begun to examine the structure at the center of the chamber when Clara returned, following the project sponsor, who bowed his head to fit through the gap in the wall.

Bruno suppressed a grin as he saw Yuzuki Kamui's eyes widen with excitement. The violet-haired man was something of an enigma to him; though temperamental and haughty, the man had considerable influence and wealth, enough to be the driving force behind this particular excavation. How he had gotten the government to lock down a high school campus like he had was beyond Bruno, and in all honesty, he didn't much care. He didn't really like the arrogant fellow, but he was enough of an archaeologist to recognize a familiar gleam in Yuzuki's eyes at the sight of the artifact they'd uncovered; he could respect a fellow lover of antiquity, if nothing else.

"As you suspected, Yuzuki-san," he spoke in heavily accented Japanese, gesturing to the pillar in the middle of the room. "The structure is untouched."

"Excellent." Kamui's deep voice reverberated in the open cavern, carrying easily through the air. He took long strides up to the pillar, pausing only two paces away. Whatever colouring had once decorated the object had faded to the barest traces, but the engravings were still sharp, showing a multitude of writing in a language Bruno had on knowledge of, along with many copies of that one symbol that had started the whole project here – a stylized trident, sharply angled and pointing downward. He watched as Kamui held fine fingers up towards the structure, hardly even brushing the surface with his fingertips, and made his way over to his wife and business partner, removing his hat with a hint of reverence.

[What do you suppose it is?] he asked Clara quietly, reverting to their native tongue. The pillar in question was perfectly cylindrical, etchings aside, and stretched from floor to ceiling; it was quite wide, large enough that a dozen people could encircle it and still not all reach each other's hands, and just slightly tilted relative to the floor of the chamber.

Clara could only shrug; neither she nor Bruno recognized the language inscribed on the pillar. [A historical record, perhaps?] she answered him quietly, more wary of the violet-haired archaeologist inspecting the structure than her husband was. [A commemoration?]

"Neither, actually." Kamui's voice rang out in an off-hand manner, as Bruno bit off an exclamation. He hadn't known that the man could speak Spanish. A further chill ran down his spine when the violet-haired man turned, his high ponytail swinging delicately behind him as he looked at the couple. "It's something much more interesting, and yet, somehow… depressingly mundane."

"… well, what is it, then?!" Clara asked angrily, annoyed that the man had been eavesdropping on them. Kamui only smiled and reached behind himself, touching a specific part of the pillar; to hers and Bruno's amazement, the object responded to the violet-haired man's touch, with several of the engraved symbols lighting up, and moments later, with an odd grinding noise, the face of the pillar split in two and began to open outwards.

"It's an elevator," Kamui said with a pompous air. "Shall we see where it leads?"

* * *

Miku leaned back, rubbing at her eyes with the heels of her hands as she let out a long sigh. "For every answer I find, there's only more questions." Her voice was heavy with fatigue as she spoke to herself, and she was a little surprised to notice how tired she sounded. She quickly looked at the window in the library, and panicked a bit when she noticed that the sun had long since set. "Oh crap! Mom is going to be so worried…"

She turned back to the table and the stacks of books in front of her, feeling just slightly stupid. Miku had been on the right track earlier, but it took nearly an hour of searching through the library's collection before she found the right book; once she'd found the symbol and its matching article, she'd gone looking in a completely different area of the library for further information. Joining the history and mythology books on the table now were a variety of atlases, tour guides, several books on lost cities and civilizations, and the one she had just put down – a very thorough English translation of Plato's _Timaeus_. It made her head hurt to read it, but it had been quite enlightening.

_Atlantis._ Miku thought the word carried a touch of wonder even in her mind. Part of her personal obsession with history stemmed from a frankly romantic impression of those lost civilizations, and Atlantis was one of the most romantic of all. Intellectually, she knew there was no reason to assume that the sigil on that buried wall had anything to do with an oceanic civilization that stood, at least in myth and legend, as a beacon of progress and enlightenment in the ancient world.

It was a nice fantasy, though.

All the same, it was a fantasy that had left her staring at the pages far longer than she should have. Time of day aside, her eyes ached from the strain of reading such small print; not for the first time, she considered getting glasses, at least for reading. Her eyesight wasn't that bad yet, but if she kept this up, she'd need them before the end of the semester.

"I'd better head home… I'll leave a note for the librarian; hopefully she'll forgive me for the mess." She quickly dashed off that note, straightened the pile of books, and left the note on top before making her way to the doors.

The hallway was deathly quiet; Miku's indoor shoes echoed loudly in the empty corridor, which she found more unnerving than the constant racket which had pervaded the school of late. Had the excavation project shut down for the night? It was certainly possible, but from everything that Miku had read, she was under the impression they were working around the clock.

As though thinking about the dig had summoned the sound, there was a sudden loud noise from down the hall; Miku jumped in place, turning to look down the hall. She knew that if she took a few more turns, she'd reach the stairs down to the boiler room. "What… what was that?"

A moment of deathly quiet passed… and then the screaming began. A dozen voices were raised in surprise and fear… and cresting above it all, a sound like the rushing wind or the rolling sea. Miku's eyes went wide, and her heart caught in her throat. She took one step backwards, nothing more than fear registering in her mind at that moment.

It didn't matter in the next second, as a wave of white mist spilled into the corridor ahead of her, boiling in all directions. She shrieked in terror, cringing and holding her arms in front of her face, as a blast of cold engulfed her…

* * *

Two or three moments passed before Miku realised she wasn't dead.

Opening her eyes cautiously, she found her gaze still pointed at the smooth surface of the school hallway beneath her feet, though it seemed to glimmer faintly, as though bathed in reflected moonlight. There was a chill in the air surrounding her, and she found herself shivering. Warily, she lowered her arms an inch, peering out into the corridor ahead… then dropped them in stunned amazement at the winter wonderland that had invaded the school.

The hall in front of her was coated in a thick layer of frost; to look at a nearby door, the fine crystalline ice had to be at least an inch deep. It covered every surface ahead of her, to her sides, even behind and above her. She turned and saw the hall behind her, well past the closed library doors, equally covered in snowy white. The only spot that _wasn't_ bathed in ice was where she stood, in a roughly three foot radius from where she stood.

"What… what just happened?" It was all Miku could think to say… and while the ice surrounding her absorbed the sound of her voice, she still felt a bit better having said something. The ice acted as a sound buffer, and she couldn't even hear noise from the city outside the school walls any more.

Carefully, she took two steps forward, probing the thick sheet of grainy frost with one foot. She could feel the cold through the thin soles of her footwear, but it seemed solid enough; she set her weight on the snow, and while there was a crunch and a slight shift as she moved forward, it didn't completely collapse.

Uncertainly, Miku made her way down the corridor towards the front entrance of the school. Given how thickly the ice had coated the doors to the classrooms, she had to check her suspicions first-hand. When she reached the shoe lockers, her heart sank; the doors were covers in the same layer of ice, and she didn't think it would be possible to get out that way without breaking the doors themselves.

Another shudder reminded Miku of the cold; looking around, she spied a cleaning bucket and kicked it free of the ice, knocking as much of the collected ice off of the vessel as she could. Picking it up, she turned back to the shoe lockers and started chipping away at the grainy snow that covered her own locker. It didn't take long to clear it; prying the frozen locker open took longer. Fortunately, the ice hadn't seeped in past the door, so she was able to rescue her outdoor wear.

For once, Miku was actually glad for the cold snap that had settled over Tokyo; it was still early in autumn, but today had dawned so chill (though dry) that Miku had worn her pea coat, scarf, and gloves along with her sneakers. She also blessed her foresight in wearing extra-long stockings today; between the length of her coat and everything else, she almost felt warm.

Briefly, the teal-haired girl debated breaking through the front doors anyway; with the bucket in her hands and sneakers on her feet, she might be able to break through the glass and not kill herself. Might. She decided it would be a better idea to see if there was another way out first, and set off back into the school, making her way down each corridor in turn. Each and every door she found, even the solid fire doors, was frozen quite solidly shut.

In a roundabout fashion, she found herself at the stairs down to the boiler room. At first glance, the stairs looked very wrong to her… she had to move closer to understand why, and when she realised it, she nearly strangled herself with a scream. The barricade had been blown _backwards_ by a rush of wind, but that wasn't the main problem; the security guards were. Both of them were little more than frost-covered bodies lying on the landing at the bottom of the first flight of stairs; the icy wind that had somehow avoided her hadn't done so here, and the two guards were unnaturally still. Slowly, Miku crept down the stairs towards them, crouching down next to one of them.

His eyes flickered upwards, causing her to yelp in surprise… but they were unfocused, barely registering her presence as anything more than mere motion. Relieved that they seemed to be alive, at least, Miku stood up and considered the situation carefully. Whatever had happened, there was more than just her escape at stake here; people were hurt, possibly dying. She had to get help. She cursed her failure to charge her cell phone again, reflecting that it would have been much easier to call for help if it still held a charge…

Following that line of reasoning, she checked the guards for phones, but neither appeared to carry one; they did each have a walkie-talkie, though they were covered in the same layer of frost and completely useless. Miku would have to look elsewhere.

She bit her lower lip uncertainly; she could go deeper into the dig, or head back up and make her way out, looking for aid in the relative safety of outside. She debated the options for a moment, when one of the guards shuddered, frost spilling from his shoulders. She glanced back at the man, who was facing her way but, like the first, not seeing much of anything. His teeth chattered audibly.

Strangely, that decided Miku; there were going to be others down in the dig site, possibly in worse shape than these two. They wasn't much she could do for them right now, but if there was anyone downstairs in need of first aid, her presence might make a difference. Plus, there was a chance that someone else down there had a working phone, which would let her call for help more quickly.

Laying one hand on the nearer guard's shoulder, she spoke quietly. "I'll bring help as soon as I can, I promise." With that, she slipped past them and carefully climbed down the stairs, making sure of her footing before she descended more than a single step. Ice on stairs, even as thick and grainy as this, was still a hazard to be cautious of.

At the bottom of the stairs sat the propped-open door to the boiler room, covered in as thick a layer of frost as everything else. She squeezed in through the doorway and stopped dead just inside; it was pitch black inside, and silent as a tomb. Fear clenched at her heart again, ebbing only when she spotted a flicker of light past a series of dark shapes. Slowly she crept through the silent chamber until she found herself in a dimly-lit tunnel. Past the concrete foundation, the tunnel seemed carved from rough rock and loose soil, and stretched on for what seemed like hundreds of metres. There were lights hanging from the ceiling, though most of them were out; the few that remained lit were either flickering dimly or had, against all odds, survived the blast of frost and burned through the ice to shine exposed.

Further onward she ventured, until she reached a strangely irregular section of tunnel; stepping through it, Miku found herself in a large, nearly empty chamber, with a half-dozen miners or other sort of worker lying on the ground in various states of freezing. Most of them were too coated in frost to move, but one had been partly shielded by a large lamp which had fallen on him; it stayed lit, and the heat from the lamp had quickly thawed some of the ice around him. She crouched down next to him, and was rewarded with flickering eyes and an uncertain gaze.

"Are you alright? Can you move?" she asked quietly, but the man gave no hint of comprehension. Gently, she tried again. "Are you injured? I… I don't know if I can lift the lamp off you, but if we work together?" She smiled with concern, and the fellow responded to it… though his response baffled her almost instantly.

"_No me puedo mover_", he said in a language she didn't understand. "_La lámpara es demasiado pesado para nosotros. Los jefes, vinieron allí, con el hombre de color púrpura._" He gestured towards the center of the room, and only now did Miku notice the angled engraved pillar in the center of the room; the lamps had fallen such that the pillar was cast in shadow. Curious despite the situation, she walked towards the pillar, looking up at it. Her breath caught in her throat as she caught sight of the same symbol she'd been researching earlier that evening.

"The trident of Atlantis… could it actually be real?" Caught up in wonder at the sight, she made her way over to the pillar and laid her hands upon it, realising belatedly that it was one of the few objects in the room _not_ coated in a thick layer of icy frost. By the time that fact clicked in her head, the pillar had already responded to her touch; Miku gasped and took a step back as several sigils on the structure lit up, including the largest of the symbols. As she stepped back, the pillar itself opened before her, revealing a dimly-lit, empty chamber.

After peering within for a moment, curiosity got the better of her, and she stepped through the doorway, setting foot on the cream-coloured stone floor. She had only taken two steps inside when she heard the whispered silence of the frozen underground chamber vanish; she turned to find that the walls of the pillar had closed in behind her, and she froze in fear.

Moments later, she shrieked as the floor began to shift and buck beneath her, and she clutched at the wall… only to find her hands rising as the wall pulled them up. Flinching away, she stepped towards the middle of the room and spun around, watching the walls. It took a few long, tense moments for the reality to sink in; the room itself seemed to be a sort of lift, and it was now descending with her on it. The full length of the interior wall was etched with the same sort of symbols as the pillar above, and many were glowing as the floor slowly dropped even further.

It was a very long two minutes later when she felt the floor shake again, knocking her off-balance. The walls of the room opened outwards again, and warily Miku stepped out of the ancient elevator… and into a scene from a storybook.

If one could have carved a room shaped like a flower from solid stone, it would look much like this. The walls around her were perfectly scalloped, and the floor and ceiling indented slightly; at the low points of the floor lay pools of ice, while in the deeper segments of the ceiling there sat shimmering circles of light, like miniature suns. The room, like the chamber above, was coated in a thick layer of hoarfrost, save for the pillar Miku had just stepped out of, and a rounded structure at the room's center. A hole in the center of the ceiling spilled a column of ice straight down onto that structure, and icicles ran down the sides, forming into channels that flowed towards the frozen pools at the low points of the room.

Taking another few steps into the room, Miku spotted vaguely human shapes across the room and hurried in that direction. There were three more here, though they looked nothing like the miners above. One was tall and curly-haired, wearing dark brown jeans and a blue shirt, along with a hat of unfamiliar style to her; another was much more slender and womanly, with dark brown hair, a red top, and tight black jeans. Both seemed to be covered in the frost and lay shivering on the ground, immobile.

The third figure was posed quite differently; he was the only Japanese person among the fallen, aside from the security guards, and he didn't look like a worker at all. He wore a white suit with a purple tie, and long violet hair pooled in frozen waves around his crumpled body. He knelt in front of a small raised pillar, the top of which was etched with more symbols of the same sort she'd seen earlier; unlike the others, he was covered in a thick layer of ice, not simply frost, and his closed eyes and still body gave no indication of whether he was even alive or not. Frightened, Miku glanced at the pillar he knelt in front of… and almost unwillingly, her eyes lifted, focusing on the structure at the center of the room.

Her breath caught in her throat as she saw pink hair flowing in waves over the bare shoulders of the woman trapped within the pillar of ice at the center of the structure. Though the outside walls of the structure were solid from the entrance, around this side it was shown to be hollow, and within was a fountain of water, frozen solid. It was within that frozen splash of water that Miku saw the woman with pale skin, dressed in a white dress that hung from her ample chest to her knees. Her eyes were closed, and her expression…

Miku thought she had never before seen anyone so sad.

Her heart cried out to the frozen woman, and without thinking, she found herself beside the man encased in ice, looking at the etched pillar. She looked between the violet-haired man and the pink-haired woman for a moment, trying to guess what had happened.

For a moment, the teal-haired girl struggled with herself. She'd gone well beyond what she needed to do here; she needed to find help for all of these people, and fast, or they'd die from hypothermia. There was no sign of any cell phone here, at least none she could use, and none of the workers up top had any; she needed to get back above-ground, break out of the school, and find a payphone or a willing passerby.

And yet… as she turned back to the woman in the ice, she couldn't help but feel drawn to her. Though she didn't seem to be in any pain, the pure sorrow lining her face somehow tugged at her heart with more force than any of the injured around her.

Without thinking consciously of it, she laid a hand on the engraved pillar next to the violet-haired man, passing her fingers delicately over the symbols. Her fingertips brushed over several in sequence, pushing on them as though they were buttons; each one lit in turn, and the fifth rune so touched, the trident shape she'd finally identified earlier that day, was the last. It blinked white three times before the pillar went still, sliding into the floor.

"Huh?" Miku blinked, as though waking from a trance, and abruptly realised what she had just done. "Oh crap! What did I-"

Her outburst was answered by a sharp crack; she turned to look at the woman in the ice, and saw a single long break in the ice, cutting right through. Another formed moments later, then another.

The woman in the ice trembled once; her eyelids parted, revealing glimmers of a deep, ocean blue.

Miku gasped aloud, and the world around her began to thaw. The temperature in the chamber rose rapidly; within moments, the sounds of fractured ice were drowned out by the burbling of flowing water. The frost quickly cleared from the bodies of the fallen man and woman, and each groaned in turn, curling inward as though trying to warm themselves. Even the man with the violet hair was beginning to thaw, though much more slowly.

Meanwhile, Miku's gaze was focused almost entirely on the pink-haired woman. As heat suffused the chamber, the ice melted away, replaced with a fresh spray of clear water. None of that touched the woman in white, however; she seemed to hover in place, between the jets of water, and as her hair and dress thawed and began to ripple, a breeze seemed to drift around her, drying her. Fascinated, Miku could only watch as the woman drifted through the fountain spray, floating towards the ground in front of her.

As the frost cleared from the ground, Miku idly noticed slightly pale green grass and bruised wildflowers. Then the woman's feet, bound in white wrappings, touched that grassy soil, and Miku's head jerked upwards, looking up into the woman's face. Her eyes were still nearly closed, but they opened a bit more as her weight returned to the earth. Her lips, pale pink in colour, parted as she took a breath, inhaling slowly.

Holding that breath, the woman turned slightly, her eyes focusing on Miku, who forgot in that moment to breathe for herself. Exhaling, a single word touched her lips.

"Mneme…"

The pink-haired woman slumped abruptly, and Miku rushed forward to catch her; despite the woman's size, she felt quite light in her arms, though her body was freezing cold. The teal-haired girl knelt quickly, supporting the larger woman's weight with her whole being.

They sat like that for a long moment, Miku holding the woman in her arms and lending her warmth to her. How long, she couldn't say in the end; she only knew that in that moment, she hadn't wanted it to end.

The peace that had settled about them was only shattered by an angry howl, and as Miku's head turned with panicked slowness, she could only see violet eyes with murder in them, at the end of an outstretched hand curled into a claw, aimed right for her face.

* * *

**For the benefit of those who can't speak Spanish, here's a translation of the miner's words: [_I cannot move._] [_The lamp is too heavy for us. The bosses, they went down there, with the purple man._]**


End file.
